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TapeWrite — Medium for your ears
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Théo Blochet
This is a great idea.
Too much of my podcasting experience is of the "listen and forget it" type. I mostly listen to podcasts during my commute/exercise. I hear some great thoughts, actionnable pieces advice, beautiful quotes... but forget them as soon as I am done with the episode.
I feel the main value of this product lies in the ability to annotate a podcast. Saving a small portion of it for later review. Just like you would highlight an insightful quote on Medium. There is no way to do that currently with OverCast, Stitcher or iTunes.
There are two big problems with building such a product :
1) Content sourcing (Basically, you'd have to build a whole new podcasting app from scratch, or, like TapeWrite, force users to manually upload audio files, which I feel involves way too much friction.)
2) Content annotation : most of the listening takes place on the go, when your hands are busy. (A cool way to do that would be to use the media buttons of your headphones, a "double tap pause to annotate" type of feature, that would record the past 15 seconds of content for later review.)
I wanted to build a similar product but was put off by having to build a whole podcasting app from scratch. Definitely looking forward to seeing how you expand on this product : a massive potential right here :)
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@theoblochet This might just be the most valuable feedback we've received so far and I'm extremely thankful for it. The "listen and forget it" experience - as you wrote - was also our main pain point and the hope of changing this experience for the better for people like you is what keeps us going with every day. Thanks for signing up - we will keep you posted about our journey of exploiting this "massive potential" :)
Love TapeWrite. This is how all podcasts should be and can't believe it didn't exist already. Huge fan of both founder and the product.
Just signed up in seconds - easy peasy. Looks really cool. Nice, clean mobile UX. Love Medium format so excited to see the approach for audio.
@borja_tapewrite what are the main types of "authors" / content have you seen coming to the platform initially?
@todd_henderson mostly people who like the idea of podcasting but are intimidated by the technical overhead of it.
Our next step is to build a paywall so publishers can have premium content they can monetize. Think a freemium netflix for your ears.
This is an interesting concept. The SSG posts piqued my interest. Looking forward to following your progress! Good luck.
I really like the concept. To be perfectly honest I'm not really into podcasts because there's a massive effort involved in downloading and listening to them, and it's hard to know when it's worth the effort. A lot of podcast buzz is manufactured, and a lot of podcasts also have a lot of "fluff" since they're trying to fill time. Knowing not just which podcasts are capturing people's attention--but also which parts--is super helpful.
@tprophet Thanks for the feedback. Discovery is indeed a hard nut to crack and we are doing our best to make the experience better on TapeWrite. We are featuring new tapes every day so make sure you check back regularly - I am sure you will find something that will not only grab your attention, but make you fall in love with the format.
Psyched to have TapeWrite featuring the Ghost Influence Podcast and making the stories shared more accessible through their beautifully interface. This is a crucial tool for podcasters to reach non-auditory learners.
One comment about our mission:
We want to eliminate the need for any investment in tech, and any worries about setting up a payment system for publishers. We want to constantly add new features that make the listening experience more engaging. We want to help publishers forget about everything that is not their main work: creating great content and engaging their audience. All for free.
I wrote a post about our next steps on medium. The TLDR: we believe premium, behind-a-paywall content is the future of indie publishing and we are building just that for TapeWrite.
https://medium.com/@tapewrite/no...
Congrats, Borja! Great article about how you've adjusted your revenue model. Smart. @tapefinder @tapewrite
Hello PH, it is a pleasure to be here. This is a 100% bootstrapped MVP we conceived last September and have been coding since. The idea is to get the best of podcasting and Medium and put it together. I'll be drafting a FAQ in the next minutes but I'd love your feedback in the mean time.
@tapefinder really liked how light the tapes are and interface also is well focused on content.
One feature request though: option to keep tape playing once we switched to read comments.
@exexzian absolutely, this already happens on mobile. We have that one in the backlog.
@tapefinder wonderful! Congrats on your launch. I think your new direction with gated content is smart. So if I'm to summarize correctly, you're looking to build YouTube Red for podcasts?
I definitely like this idea. Though I will say this, until you get lots of users I'd rather invest in my own mobile app with its own gated content.
So will you continue uploading episodes of The Pitch and stripping them of ads? When do I get the first check 😉
I'm kidding, but I am curious what are your next steps?
@joshmuccio we have changed our back end so we can actually pull from your RSS. Will do that from the next episode. Yes, youtube red is a great analogy.
You are a tech savvy person who can think of having your own app and a great marketeer who can find advertisers and read beautiful ads. Many people we talk to are neither of those and just want to take the relationship with their 10 loyal listeners to a new level.
Our unfair andvantage is besides a superior format, that we are in a very affluent area (north Europe) where:
a) people are used and willing to pay for great content
b) spoken audio is still consumed as in the 20th century
c) everyone has a smartphone.
FAQ
- Is this a podcatcher?
No, the world does not need another podcatcher. There are plenty great apps already available. When you publish on TapeWrite we host the file for you. We have a little back end trick that allows us to pull from some podcasts RSS so we can have some good content to start with but users can only upload the mp3s to the platform.
- What's with the cards? Podcasts come with show notes. In TapeWrite you can add them as cards at certain points of the audio. You can comment, share or bookmark those cards. It truly makes the listening experience better, even if you don;t look at the screen while you do it. You can keep context during and way after the listening.
- How much does it cost to host audio on TapeWrite?
Zero. Forever. You don't pay to host your videos or photos, why pay for audio?
- I want to press a button and record!
The guys at anchor nailed that one. Our platform is more geared to people who already know how to produce an mp3. The hard part of long-form audio is not recording, is *editing*, as in knowing how to make the story flow, what parts to cut, what parts to re-record. That is not solved by tech.
- Why would someone just publish on TapeWrite and not send to iTunes and elsewhere?
This is a good one. Most podcasters want to be in all possible platforms so they want to host once and let the magic of RSS spread their content everywhere. The flip side is that podcasters don't visit those client apps so there is no way to have a conversation with them in the place where you listen.
- Where's the IOS app? We want to go through a couple iterations on the web app before going IOS and Android. We are a small bootsrapped team so we prefer to do one thing right.
Congrats @tapefinder I have been following some of your thoughts in ssg and its cool to see someone committed to is product and the solution that it represents!
@jrdbacosta - yeah @tapefinder is a gem. One of the rock stars on SSG for sure. Through him, the community is learning. And he asks all the great questions to advisors, investors, and other founders. We are lucky and proud to have him at SSG.
This is interesting Borja, I really love the integration of the cards and I can see how I could get good value out of them if I find relevant content I want to listen to. I am wondering in what context I will be drawn to this format but for me it's just a matter of finding the right content. As a user that would mostly consume not create within tapewrite, if someone that has earned my attention publish's content with typewrite I would listen to it and I would then no doubt be able to experience the advantages of the added features. I just need to be brought there first. Brilliant keep pushing forward
@derekmartin Oh Derek, that is the main challenge. We need good content to bring an audience and an audience for getting top content. We are building a paywall that we hope will attract indie publishers who want to monetize their content.
@tapefinder Thats great, you are on your way best of luck, looking forward to having all my cards of knowledge saved up !
@tapefinder @liebergabor Awesome stuff! It's very ineteractive and will def change the way you listen to audio, podcasts. Looking forward to more..Great stuff guys!
@varun3 @liebergabor thanks! I see you are an Angel, we are raising our seed round now. Incorporated in London UK, 100% capital owned by the founding team.
@tapefinder @liebergabor Yea..we have done investments in many startups..what kind of investments are you looking at?
Hello PH! As my co-founder and good friend Borja already said, it's a proud moment for us to be here and to see all the great feedback. If you have any questions just let us know in the comments, we'll be checking the thread regularly and happy to answer.
Shootout to @liebergabor who also left a fat paycheck and taught himself UX design in a week. We spent exactly 250 bucks in a logo, the rest is totally bootstrapped.
curious to hear how your customer feedback has been? Seems like a great concept -- any major competitors?
@samir_doshi yes, FM radio. For real. We are based in Europe and here the penetration of podcasting is astonishingly low. 270 million smartphone-carrying Europeans listen to traditional radio every day, and that includes 62% of milennials.
@tapefinder Glad I asked --- you've opened up my perspective ... I think it's the "snackability" of FM radio --- it's just there no brainer...